BROOKE GLADSTONE: Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges hates war, though he used to love it. In an interview with us last December he spoke of the adrenaline rush, the camaraderie, the exalted detachment from ordinary life.
[CLIP FROM DECEMBER INTERVIEW]


CHRIS HEDGES: It's a kind of addiction. You know, I'd jump from war to war to war for almost two decades. It was no accident that I was covering the war in Kosovo with people I had covered the war in Central America with 20 years before!


BROOKE GLADSTONE: But after so many blood-soaked stories had run through his pen onto the pages of the Times, Hedges found it harder to stay in that rarified warrior moment. He felt boxed in by self-awareness and the history he'd witnessed. Where once he saw nobility and sacrifice, he saw self-interest and futility. He swore off war reporting and wrote a book called War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

Last Saturday, he returned to his alma mater, Rockford College in Illinois, to give the commencement address, and he spoke against the war in Iraq. It's often been said that since 9/11 the rights we cherish and seek to extend are coming under increasing pressure at home. Hedges told the students at Rockford College that the government and the media had colluded in crafting a glorious image of war, suffused with patriotism and cleansed of death.
[CLIP FROM COMMENCEMENT SPEECH]


CHRIS HEDGES: We feel in wartime comradeship--
[BOOING, JEERING, CONTINUING UNDER]
we confuse this with friendship, with love. There are those who will insist that the comradeship of war is love. The ecstatic glow that makes us in war feel as one people, one entity, is real. But this is part of war's intoxication.


BROOKE GLADSTONE: His speech was not well received. Twice his mike- was cut off; crowd members turned their backs on him, jeered, used foghorns, jumped threateningly onto the stage. The college president intervened. When Hedges finally concluded, campus security accompanied him off the stage. The Rockford Register Star ran with the headline Speaker Disrupts RC Graduation.

Speaker disrupts graduation?! Hedges' speech sent two potent messages to graduates that day. He told them to resist war fever, because in its heat, we can lose ourselves, our sense of individual responsibility. By its actions, the crowd showed the consequences for American freedom, of succumbing.


BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers, Megan Ryan and Tony Field; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Christiansen and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Sharon Ball and Blake Carlton. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.


BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.


BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.